Lenka Slavikova

Jan Evangelista Purkyně University | UJEP · Institute for Economic and Environmental Policy

Dealing with climate-driven natural hazards like river or pluvial floods, droughts, heat waves or forest fires play a central role across the globe in the twenty-first century. Urban resilience has become an important term in response to climate change. Resilience describes the ability of a system to absorb shocks. Resilience depends on the vulnera...

Substantial public and private resources have been devoted to recover from floods (through building and infrastructure reconstructions) pursuing the solidarity principle. However, particular flood recovery schemes have not been used strategically to prevent future damages. The prevention and recovery phases seem to be in many ways disconnected. Tha...

How can we achieve resilience of urban areas? That is the central challenge set in this edited volume. While we don’t attempt to provide a comprehensive answer to this complex challenge, contributions in this volume focus on one of the major aspects of implementing resilience that has hitherto largely been overlooked in academic and professional de...

Urban areas are hot spots of flood risk due to how urban development concentrates people and assets into hazard prone areas, reinforcing negative externalities on the welfare of urban residents. Mitigating flood risk in urban environments, however, is challenging. This is not only because the process generating flood risk is complex, but the object...

Centralising the role of land and landowners, Spatial Flood Risk Management brings together knowledge from socio-economy, public policy, hydrology, geomorphology, and engineering to establish an interdisciplinary knowledge base on spatial approaches to managing .

Plain Language Summary Flood risks are expected to increase in the future due to the combined effects of climate change, land use change and population growth. New approaches are needed to complement conventional flood risk management (FRM) based on engineering solutions and project‐based approaches. In this Commentary we present the findings of th...

Scholars and practitioners endorse public participation in the decision-making process as enhancing the health of democracy, justice, and effectiveness of policy outcomes. To sustain or even increase the number of participants in the long run, it is crucial to start raising a new politically active generation already during their youth and even ear...

The major event that hit Europe in summer 2021 reminds society that floods are recurrent and among the costliest and deadliest natural hazards. The long-term flood risk management (FRM) efforts preferring sole technical measures to prevent and mitigate floods have shown to be not sufficiently effective and sensitive to the environment. Nature-Based...

Implementing the Climate-Smart Forestry (CSF) concept into practice requires interaction among key stakeholders, especially forest owners and managers, policymakers (or regulators in general), forest consultants, and forest users. But what could be the most effective policy instruments to achieve climate smartness in mountain forests? Which ones wo...

The reflection of ecosystem services in environmental policy has recently become a key aspect in solving environmental problems occurring as a consequence of their overburdening. However, decision makers often pay attention predominantly to results of quantitative (monetary valuation) methods. This article explores a new way of combining quantitati...

We need to change how we think about flood risk management. Successfully implementing sustainable flood risk mitigation measures requires approaches that are different from the management of grey infrastructure measures, such as dams, dikes, or levees. For large grey infrastructure projects, the defining factor is engineer-ing. Measures are designe...

Nature-based solutions (NbS) are often framed positively in terms of win–win options or no-regret measures. However, are NbS equally beneficial for everyone? Are burdens and benefits of NbS really equally distributed and projects embraced by everyone? Is the process leading to the implementation of NbS always fair and inclusive? This chapter provid...

Flood resilience (resilient flood risk management), which has been repeatedly demanded, can be achieved through the phases of the risk management cycle. There is a vast body of literature on adaptation, disaster risk reduction measures, and effectiveness of prevention, seen through the lens of postdisaster recovery, but oftentimes the existing lite...

Climate change adaptation planning is of high urgency in cities due to expected climate change impacts. Ecosystem-based approaches to adaptation (EbAs) are considered highly efficient in enhancing sustainable resilience of cities; however, incorporation of EbA measures into the decision-making process has not been fully achieved at the individual c...

Twenty years ago, the European Union launched one of its flagship environmental regulations, the Water Framework Directive (WFD). Since its inception in 2000, the WFD has been a guiding light for water professionals within and beyond the EU; it has pioneered ecological standards for water quality, cycles of river basin management planning, particip...

Although private or community initiatives for biodiversity conservation (such as land trusts) have a strong tradition in many countries, rigorous evidence of recently evolved movements in post-socialist countries is missing. This study describes the evolution of Czech land trust movement and analyses their representatives' motivation for engagement...

Options for the increase of flood resilience during the recovery phase is, to a large extent, overlooked. The special issue Financial Schemes for Resilient Flood Recovery investigates how the implementation of financial schemes (government relief subsidies, insurance schemes, buy-outs, etc.) might increase flood resilience. Five papers address foll...

Special Issue

The recent paradigm shift towards multilevel flood risk governance has raised discussions about the potential of different entities to undertake specific flood risk management (FRM) measures and about the effects of their efforts on other governance levels. Among the key questions being addressed are those related to the balance and possible invers...

The frequency and severity of extreme weather events are expected to increase due to climate change. These developments and challenges have focused the attention of policymakers on the question of how to manage natural hazards. The main political discourse revolves around the questions of how we can make our society more resilient for possible futu...

Flood recovery is an important period in the flood risk management cycle. Recently, flood recovery has become viewed as an opportunity for future flood damage mitigation. Financial flows to cover flood damages and rules regarding their allocation are crucial for supporting or undermining mitigation efforts. In this paper, we map and compare state f...

Nature-based solutions (NBS) have recently spread to the flood risk management (FRM) agenda as potentially efficient and sustainable measures to reduce the susceptibility to and impacts of various kinds of floods. The aim of this chapter is to introduce the roots of various conceptualizations of scale, the way they are encountered, and the implicat...

This open access book addresses the various disciplinary aspects of nature-based solutions in flood risk management on private land. In recent decades, water management has been moving towards nature-based solutions. These are assumed to be much more multi-purpose than traditional “grey infrastructures” and seem to be regarded as a panacea for many...

Private land matters in FRM. In particular, private land is closely associated with NBS in FRM—nature-based flood risk management. Nature-based solutions are currently receiving a large degree of attention in policy, academia and slowly in practice (see introduction). These measures need more land, and this land is often privately owned. However, e...

Nature-based solutions (NBS) in Flood Risk Management require more—and mostly privately owned—land, and more diverse stakeholder involvement than traditional (grey) engineering approaches. This also implies that there are challenges related to different disciplines. Flood risk management with NBS is an issue not only of technical expertise, but it...

Do landowners realize (and privately fund) natural water retention measures (NWRM) on their own land? Why? And how are they capable of assessing the hydrological and ecological effects of these measures? The Czech case study presents the story of an individual farmer who decided to invest his private resources in water retention and biodiversity en...

This book is a final outcome of the research project supported by Czech Science Foundation. Its aim was to explore the motivations, mechanisms and effectiveness as well as efficiency of decisions concerned with environmental risk reduction in Czechia. The project was carried out by the interdisciplinary team of J. E. Purkyně University in Ústí nad...

The multilevel adaptive governance of flood risk reduction has been emphasized in the last decades and supported by the requirements of European Flood Directive (EC 2007), while assigning an increasingly important role to municipalities. By contrast, only fragmented efforts have addressed the personal (expert knowledge), financial, and institutiona...

POLICY BRIEF Number 1 April 2018 Key policy messages: • Flood water can be stored in the catchment, upstream of cities, or in the cities themselves. • In all three areas, the affected land is often privately owned. • Hence flood risk management – including prevention and resilience – should be based upon land management.

In order to tackle the impacts of global climate change, the EU has published the EU Strategy on Adaptation to Climate Change. The existence of the Strategy has led to the establishment of national strategies at the member state level, which mostly recommend focusing on the self-government level and the private sector. However, strategies do not br...

Recently, the role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)s in environmental governance has been widely investigated, especially regarding the issue of mandatory public participation in policy-making within a European context. This paper aims to redirect scientific attention from their pure participation to their field actions, i.e., to the role th...

Environmental information disclosure instruments inevitably also carry information costs. It is important to pay attention to these costs because of the competitiveness issues connected with the regulatory burden of the private sector or the overall cost-effectiveness of different types of environmental regulation from the public sector point of vi...

Water demand management stresses the crucial roles of water user motivations in balancing actual water availability and competing human needs. This paper shows how the absence of such motivations influences artificial water scarcity, even in resource-abundant countries, and how slight modifications to economic instruments (surface water charges in...

The growing demand for clean water has led to the adoption of the EU Water Framework Directive (Directive 2000/60 EC; WFD). The new legislation has had a major impact on water management and national economies and instituted numerous requirements, including “good status” of all water bodies by 2015. However, achieving “good status” is associated wi...

Large inland floods represent a serious threat to the Central European territory. It is therefore necessary to develop efficient flood-risk management based on shared responsibility, stressing the importance of the self-engagement of local actors (such as municipalities, household, etc.). Central government flood expenditures are an influential fac...

The European Union (EU) Water Framework Directive (WFD) requires EU member states to produce and implement river basin management plans, which are to be designed and updated via participatory processes that inform, consult with, and actively involve all interested stakeholders. The assumption of the European Commission is that stakeholder participa...

Supplementary Materials: Transforming European Water Governance? Participation and River Basin Management under the EU Water Framework Directive in 13 Member States. The supporting information provides the variable descriptions and a detailed account of the data aggregation procedures employed during the analysis, as well as a list of literature so...

The growing demand for clean water has led to the adoption of the EU Water Framework Directive (Directive 2000/60 EC; WFD). The new legislation has had a major impact on water management and national economies and instituted numerous requirements, including “good status” of all water bodies by 2015. However, achieving “good status” is associated wi...

The aim of this methodology is to provide methodological instructions for assessment of cost disproportionality of measures for organisations authorised in water planning, more precisely for authors of economic analyses. Předkládaná metodika si klade za cíl poskytnout metodický návod k hodnocení nákladové nepřiměřenosti opatření subjektům pověřeným...

Quantitative methods (economic valuation) in socio-economic environmental research still dominate as the main methodological approach used for decision-making in environmental governance. According to Downward et Mearman (2006), Bryman (2006), Austin et al. (2010) and others, the mixed-method research (a combination of quantitative and qualitative...

Within large European project REFRESH, the IEEP and IREAS, Institute for Structural Policy teams were responsible for the economic analysis of the euthrophication problem at Orlik water reservoir situated at Southern Bohemia. The analysis contains the cost-effectiveness evaluation of proposed measures for the phosphorus inflow reduction. Further, b...

The paper investigates whether there is a statistically significant impact of short-term climate variables (specifically air temperature and rainfall) on residential water consumption at two selected case sites in the Czech Republic. The analysis is based on a unique time series of daily data from 2004–2009. The statistical methods used are CART me...

Economics of the environment as an applied field of economics was established during the 1960s. At the time of its foundation, neoclassical environmental economics represented the mainstream view regarding the explanation of the causes of environmental problems and their solutions. Since then, however, two other competing approaches - the free mark...

The commentary defends the central idea of current institutional social research – that institutions are significant variables influencing the human action regarding the resource allocation. This idea was strongly opposed by the scientific board of the Czech economic faculty (institutionally oriented economic research was labeled as needless). The...

The commentary defends the central idea of current institutional social research - that institutions are signifi cant variables infl uencing the human action regarding the resource allocation. This idea was strongly opposed by the scientifi c board of the Czech economic faculty (institutionally oriented economic research was labeled as needless). T...

The public participation principle is currently an accented element of European Union environmental policy. It is believed that by involving local stakeholders into decision-making, environmental resources will be managed more successfully. TheWater Framework Directive introduces the public participation principle into the water management of all M...

The paper describes two evolving qualitative methods of socioeconomic research – the analytic narrative conceptualized by R. Bates and his colleagues and the institutional analysis developed by E. Ostrom – and introduces their pilot application within the field of the environmental protection in the Central European dimension. Authors of the paper...

Článek se zabývá účastí veřejnosti a aktivní účastí zaintereso-vaných stran na rozhodování o alokaci přírodních zdrojů, a to zejména na příkladu plánování v oblasti vod v ČR. Na základě rešerše zahraniční literatury popisujeme znaky dobrého procesu účasti a toto teoretické vymezení srovnáváme s realitou konkrétního procesu v ČR. u Účast veřejnosti...

The paper describes two evolving qualitative methods of socioeconomic research - the analytic narrative conceptualized by R. Bates and his colleagues and the institutional analysis developed by E. Ostrom - and introduces their pilot application within the field of the environmental protection in the Central European dimension. Authors of the paper...

vod Komplexní environmentální problémy, jako je klimatická změna, vyžadují nové metody zkoumání, propojující poznatky přírodních a společenských věd (i různé postupy v rámci skupiny společenských věd). V souvislosti s touto potřebou se hovoří o tzv. interdisciplinaritě. Jak uvádí Chen (1983), vědci v oblasti přírodních věd řeší primárně otázky typu...

The economic valuation of environmental resources is considered to be an important theoretical tool for decision-making on the allocation of scarce natural resources. However, its practical (political) use is often questioned. Within the paper the usefulness of the widely used contingent valuation method for local tourism strategies is defended. Th...

Due to methodological problems and their practical limitations, the criticism of neoclassical environmental economics is increasing. The goal of this paper is to stress the differences and similarities between the two competing alternative approaches - institutional ecological economics and free-market approaches to environmental protection - to en...

Tento článek podléhá autorským právům, kopírování a využívání jeho obsahu bez řádného odkazování na něj je považováno za plagiátorství a podléhá sankcím dle platné legislativy. Internetový recenzovaný časopis vydává Univerzita Karlova v Praze, Katedra politologie Institutu politologických studií Fakulty sociálních věd. Abstract: Natural disasters h...

The governance of common pool resources (CPR) implies establishing compatibility between ecosystems and social systems and enforcing governance institutions as essential links to maintain the capacity of socio-ecological systems. In the given context a behavioural experiment with a CPR was conducted, inspired by the innovative work of recent Nobel...

The paper contains a descriptive analysis of selected interdisciplinary research methods developed for the study of complex socio-ecological systems (climate change problems in particular). Institutional analysis and participatory methods of social consensus are in the centre of the focus.

Neoclassical environmental economics, ecological economics and free market approaches to environmental protection are currently three main schools of thoughts that are systematically focused on interactions between the society and the environment. They all have strong defenders as well as opponents. Although the environmental economics is still con...

This paper addresses the problems of institutional changes in governance and the framing of biodiversity conservation policy at the level of the enlarged European Union. The current development of European Union governance has become more complex and multilevel, partially usurping competences from the central state and relying on networks of interc...

Important tools of the current environmental policy are economic (market) instruments - i.e. fees, taxes and tradable permits. However, the design of such instruments should be done in a way to enable the evaluation of their environmental efficiency and economic effectiveness. The evaluation is rarely done in post-communist countries, where market...

Neoclassical environmental economics, ecological economics and free market approaches to environmental protection are currently three main schools of thoughts that are systematically focused on interactions between the society and the environment. They all have strong defenders as well as opponents. Although the environmental economics is still con...

Private, state or common ownership of forests co-exist in various countries as a result of their institutional evolution in the past. The government regulation of forest management goes across all property right structures. Empirical studies and theoretical discussions try to reveal sustainable forest property regimes that would balance the use and...